In July of last year, former NBA player Lorenzen Wright was shot. A witness called 911 during the shooting but never disclosed Wright’s location, so it took Germantown, TN, police nine days to find him. By that time he’d decomposed from roughly “225 pounds to 57 pounds”. Nine days of decomposing. By the time they found him they obviously couldn’t do anything or form an investigation, and if they’d gone straight to the scene when it was reported they might’ve saved his life. So what took them so long? The cops could’ve traced the initial call with a simple program on the Internet … but they weren’t allowed to use the Internet.

Wright’s family claims officials had BLOCKED the police from using online programs because certain officers had been abusing their web access.

So there you have it. If you’re shot in Germantown you’d better drag your ass to the nearest hospital, because some cop couldn’t stop going on Craigslist and made law enforcement impossible for everyone.

I can barely believe this, and I hope TMZ tossed “Wright’s family claims” into the sentence because they’re just upset and trying to find a reason why this happened, and that the rest of the sentence isn’t true. You’re a police office, not an Office Max call center, you need to have the Internet and everything on it. And yeah, I can understand why a bored policeman might want to play Snood or look at porn, but when a guy at work googles “ayaka komatsu nude” too many times you just fire him, you don’t throw his computer in the river. What’d they do, give everybody an abacus because some jerk-off cop typed 80085 into his calculator and showed it to everybody?

We live in a sad, weird world. Remind me to never get shot in western Tennessee.

I gotta call BS on this one. Its fairly trivial to block access to things like porn and online poker, but still allow network access for applications that need it.

07.21.11 at 4:05 pm

Greene

@Adam Publicly funded police departments don’t have the budget to hire a dedicated IT person that knows how to do selective blocking. It’s just J.K. Simmons going “Fine, if you can’t behave like adults, I’m going to take this away.”

07.22.11 at 12:03 am

InternetLawyer

Police officers are not the ones who trace calls. Dispatchers have a program that will give the cell tower a call came from and a distance from that tower. Depending on the area the tower is located this info can be extremely useful or useless.